Today.. a tale of technology woes...

I love technology... when it works. Technology is not always reliable... after all, it's just a bunch of ones and zeros that have been manipulated in a variety of ways by programmers so that I can create and edit movies, download and edit digital photographs, create documents, and communicate through a variety of methods (voice, email, web, chat, etc).

The past 2 days have been a bit challenging. In the midst of backing up my files to a portable hard drive early Monday morning (after working through the weekend on a variety of back to school tasks) ... the hard drive on my Powerbook stopped responding when I tried to stop the copying process since it was taking longer than I had expected. When I couldn't stop the process, I chose to "force quit" and relaunch the Finder to get out of the "copying" mode. The computer would not cooperate and I needed to leave for work, so I chose to simply "shut down" the computer.

And now, so sad to report, I have not been able to start it back up. I haven't had a great deal of time to try the various utilities (such as Disk Warrior), but preliminary measures (booting in "target" mode and Safe booting) have been fruitless. I am becoming less confident that I will actually be able to get my data back. I am pretty diligent about backing up at least monthly, and usually archive important files as I create them (to a server or some portable device), just in case of a technolgy failure, so I only stand to lose a few weeks worth of work.

We were also plagued by network glitches today. Our well-planned roll out of Tiger, and Open Directory services has taught us a thing or two. Teachers and staff are becoming restless, it's amazing how much we actually depend on this stuff.

To top it off, I created a nifty movie to present to our back to school celebration this evening, and when playing in full screen mode from iMovie, through a data projector, the soundtrack would simply not keep up with the video... what's with that!? I was presenting from a brand new MacBook with nothing else running, and having almost 30 GBs of free hard drive space. How disappointing and a tad embarassing, since I "am" the technology person.

Oh well, unless you're dead, you can recover from the worst that happens. I hope tomorrow is less problematic.